Coming Attractions!
Primeval Television includes early live TV broadcasts preserved on kinescopes, innovations like the first TV cartoons and infomercials, forgotten shows like "Top Secret" and anything long unseen or unknown from the dawn of broadcasting up to 1959. Enjoy these prevues of Primeval Television gems, currently in production for a Spring 2013 release.
Primeval Television
- Top Secret (1954) TV spy series told in 12 minute stories and featuring the first computer to play a role in a TV show - Amic! Did Amic inspire Steve Jobs as a child?
- Comic Strips of Television (1948) Long-lost pilot for the very first cartoon series produced specifically for television, created by pioneer animator Jay Ward (Rocky & Bullwinkle). It features the debut of the cartoon character Dudley DoRight (as a gay Mountie) and Crusader Rabbit who starred in his own TV cartoon series as a result of this pilot. The above clip features Hamhock Jones.
- Felix in The Bone Age (1922) Silent cartoons produced during the pioneer days of motion pictures were given new life with at the advent of television. Here we present a rare prime example of this historic phenomenon with our previously lost complete version of Felix the Cat in the Bone Age. Directed by Otto Messmer and produced by Pat Sullivan
- The Beulah Show (1950) Singer/film legend Ethyl Waters (Cabin in the Sky, Pinky) was TV’s Beulah for the first 2 seasons before quitting this early interracial ABC sitcom. This episode features Butterfly McQueen as a maid and Dooley “play it again, Sam” Wilson as series’ regular Bill Jackson -- a handyman forever courting Beulah.
- Telenews (1956) Beginning in the mid-1950s Hearst Metrotone News syndicated a 10-minute theatrical newsreel expressly for television with weekly doses of national and international stories of significance.
- Judge Roy Bean (1956 – color) veteran actor Edgar Buchanan portrays the famous irascible Wild West magistrate in this 1950s series. Judge Bean is hot on the trail of a marauding band of Apache’s who are being led by a white man. From a rare Kodachrome film print.
- Adventures of Hiram Holiday (1957) what today could be more politically incorrect than diminutive comic Wally Cox on a middle-east spy mission who takes on a facially-hairless Sebastian Cabot portraying a villainous but jovial Arab sheik in a plot involving Arab terrorists out to assassinate four world leaders?
- Lines & Fines (1953) At the outset this appears to be a TV game show much like I've Got a Secret -- especially as it purports to star "The greatest brains in show business" which turn out to be Sid Melton, Mike Mazurki, Gretchen Wyler, George Tobias and Pat Tillman. However, this is likely the world's first infomercial with all questions and inane answers pertaining to characteristics of Admiral Refrigerators.
- Martin Kane, Private Eye (1952) Lloyd Nolan plays the TV version of the popular radio sleuth. The U.S. Tobacco Co. sponsored this series and early use of product placement is everywhere to be seen – as each episode begins in a tobacco shop where the plot is established while most everyone is smoking.
